'Oh shit, oh shit, shit, shit!' Vic hammered on the steering wheel with his fists; the driver's air bag hanging like a spent condom from the wheel boss, and another air bag limp beside his head. 'Are you all right?' he asked Ashley.
She nodded, staring at the bonnet of the car, which was raised jaggedly up in front of her, the Mercedes star that had been on the end now invisible. There was another car, white, stopped at a crazy angle in the middle of the road a few yards away.
Vic tried to open his door, and seemed to be having difficulty. Then he threw his weight against it and, with a scream from the hinges, it opened.
Ashley's door opened without a problem. She undipped her belt and stepped out shakily, then pinched her nose and blew hard to clear her ears. She could see a bewildered-looking grey-haired woman behind the wheel of the other car, a Saab, with much of its nose crumpled.
Vic inspected the damage to the Mercedes. The offside front wheel was crushed and buckled and pushed right into the engine compartment. There was no chance of the car being driveable.
'You stupid fucking bitch!' Vic yelled, above the blare of the Mercedes horn, at the Saab.
Ashley could see another car coming up the road, and a van coming from the opposite direction. And she could see a young man running towards them. 'Vic,' she shouted urgently, 'we need to do something, for Christ's sake!'
'Yeah, right, we need to do something. What do you fucking suggest?'
346
Back at the Incident Room, Nick Nicholl suddenly yelled at Grace. 'Roy! Line seven, pick it up, pick it up!'
Grace stabbed the button and lifted the receiver to his ear. 'Roy Grace,' he said. It was a Detective Sergeant from Brighton police station called Mark Tuckwell. 'Roy,' he said, 'the Mercedes you have an alert out on, blue saloon, Lima-Juliet-Zero-Four-Papa-X-RayIima?'
'Yes.'
'Its just been involved in a RTA in Newhaven. The occupants, one male, one female, have hijacked a vehicle.' Grace sat bolt upright, the phone clenched to his ear, adrenaline exploding.
'Have they taken hostages?'
'No.'
'Do we have descriptions of the two people?'
'Not great ones so far. Man stocky, Caucasian, cropped hair, mid forties; the woman has short dark hair, late twenties, early thirties.' Grabbing a pen, he asked, 'What are the details of the vehicle they've taken?'
'A Land Rover Freelander, Green, Whisky-Seven-Nine-Six-LimaDeltaYankee.' Scribbling this down, Grace asked, 'Any contact with this car so far?'
'Not yet.'
'Exactly how long ago was it taken?'
'Ten minutes.' Grace thought for a moment. Ten minutes. You could get a long damned way in ten minutes. He thanked the Detective Sergeant and told him he would call him back in a couple of minutes and to keep his line clear. Then Grace quickly briefed his team. Handing the vehicle details to Nick Nicholl he said, 'Nick, circulate the vehicle details to all the surrounding counties - Surrey, Kent, Hampshire - and also the Met. Now!' He thought for a moment. The roads to the east of Newhaven went to Eastbourne and Hastings. To the north were the fast roads to Gatwick Airport and to London. To the west was Brighton. Most likely, if they stayed with the Land Rover, they would head north. Turning to DS Moy he said, 'Bella, get the helicopter up. On the assumption they are heading away from the area, get it positioned to cover the roads ten to fifteen miles north of Newhaven.'
'Right.'
'When you've done that, get a watch put on all CCTV at the railway stations in the area, in case they try to ditch the vehicle and get a train.' He drank a swig of water. 'Emma-Jane, call the Road Policing Department and get some vehicles up on the A23 on look-out for this car immediately. When you've done that, alert the police at Newhaven Harbour and Gatwick and Shoreham Airports.' He ran through a mental checklist, stations, seaports, airports, roads. Often, he knew, when people hijacked cars they would only drive them a short distance, ditch them and take a different car.
'Glenn,' he said, 'get the whole surrounding area of Newhaven flooded - we want to make sure they haven't abandoned the car yet. Also get a couple of our patrol cars here on standby.' 'I'll do it now.' Grace rang through to the Ops Room and informed them he was taking command of the incident. The clerk there told him there was one update that had just come in. A car matching the description had sideswiped several cars at a traffic light as it had cut past them on the pavement to get over the Newhaven swing bridge seconds before it opened. This information was just two minutes old.
Vic Delaney stabbed the brake pedal hard as they came into a righthander on the winding country road that was much sharper than he had realized. The front wheels locked and for a sickening moment they carried straight on, towards a poplar tree, while he wrestled with the chunky steering wheel. Ashley screamed, 'Viiiic!' The car lurched violently to the right, the front slewing round, the rear wheels breaking way, then he over-corrected and they were heading at another poplar. Then back, the top-heavy car swinging like a weighted sack, their luggage crashing around in the rear. Then they were back under control. 'Slow down, Vic, for God's sake!' There was a massive truck ahead, crawling along, and in a moment they were on its tail, with no room to pass. 'Oh, fucking Jesus!' he said, braking, hammering the steering wheel in frustration. It had all gone wrong. The story of my life, he thought. His dad had died of drink when he'd been in his teens. Shortly before his eighteenth birthday he'd beaten up his mother's lover because the guy was a punk and treated her like shite. And his mother had responded by throwing him, Vic, out. He'd drifted into the services in search of adventure, and instantly felt at home in the Marines, except he'd also acquired a taste for money. Lots of money. In particular he liked fancy clothes, cars, gambling and tarts.
But above all else he liked the feeling he got - all that respect - when he walked into a casino in a sharp suit. And what better massage for a man's pride could there be than to get comped at a casino for a steak dinner, maybe a room, too. A lucky streak in the casinos during his second year in the Marines netted him some big loot, then an unlucky streak wiped him out. He'd then teamed up with a bent Quartermaster called Bruce Jackman, in charge of the ordnance supplies, and found an easy way to make fast money by selling off guns, ammunition and other military supplies via a website. When that was in the process of beir rumbled, he'd garrotted Bruce Jackman, and left him hanging in bi*| bedroom with a suicide note. And had never lost a night's sleep over| it since. Life was a game, survival of the sharpest. In his view humans made the mistake of trying to pretend they were any different to the animal world. All life was the law of the jungle. That didn't mean you couldn't love someone. He'd been deeply, crazily, besottedly in love with Alex from the moment he had first seen her. She had it alclass="underline" real class, style, stunning beauty, a great body, and she was a dirty cow in bed. She was everything he had ever wanted in a woman and way more. And she was the only woman he had met who was more ambitious than himself - and who had a game plan to achieve her simple goals: make a fortune when you are young, then spend the rest of your life enjoying it. Dead simple. Now all they had to do was get to Gatwick Airport and catch a plane. The interior of the Freelander stank of diesel fumes from the exhaust of the massive lorry in front of him, crawling at less than 30 mph.
He pulled out to see if he could pass, then pulled back in sharply as a truck thundered past in the opposite direction. Increasingly impatient, they followed the truck through a sweeping, dipping, S-bend, past a quarry sign, then up a hill, the truck slowing even more. He slipped his left hand over into Ashley's lap, found her hand, squeezed it. 'We'll be all right, angel.' She squeezed his hand back, by way of a reply. Then a blue sparkle in the mirror caught his eye. And a cold sliver of fear whiplashed through his belly. He watched the mirror carefully. Tarmac, grass and trees unspooled behind them. Then the sparkle of blue again and this time there was no mistaking it. Shit. Any second it would come into sight around the corner. Pulling out again, he suddenly saw to his right a wooden public footpath signpost, and a wide track, and in one swift jerk of the wheel, swung the Freelander right across the path of an oncoming van and onto the bumpy, overgrown track, the car crashing into a deep, water-filled pothole, then out the other side. In his mirror he saw a police car flash past in the opposite direction, much too fast, he hoped, to have seen them.